In what was demonstrated in court as a multi-agency effort to take down”, a large international conspiracy” to peddle anabolic steroids and other illegal muscle building drugs, the Federal prosecutors landed two guilty pleas.
Ronald J. Sales, 46, of the St. Louis area and Paul G. Matthews, 51, of the Pittsburgh area pleaded guilty and the duo now face September sentencing.
Mr. Matthews ran Matthews Training Concepts and was caught running a steroid manufacturing facility in his home.
Although there was no testimony at hearings Tuesday to any direct business links between Mr. Matthews and Mr. Sales, both were accused of conspiracy to distribute 40,000 units of steroids in Western Pennsylvania and elsewhere, and of paying for them by sending money to Ukraine and China.
At Mr. Matthews’ guilty plea hearing, Assistant U.S. Attorney Mary McKeen Houghton said that he was doing business with two Ukrainian men, later identified as Oleksandr “Musclebear” Skochyk and Yeveniy Suray.
The two Ukrainians were indicted by a Pittsburgh-based federal grand jury a year ago for distributing illegal, Chinese-made steroids and synthetic testosterone. Arrest warrants were issued, and Ms. Houghton said the men are being extradited.
She said that if Mr. Matthews had not pleaded guilty, agents from the Drug Enforcement Agency, Food and Drug Administration, Internal Revenue Service, Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and U.S. Postal Service, among others, would have testified at his trial.
According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, use of steroids could cause aggression, mood swings, liver damage, infertility in men, and other health problems.
In the first week, the participants slept eight hours each night at home. Then they had three nights of 10-hour sleep and eight nights of 5-hour sleep in a sleep laboratory.
The results showed that testosterone levels decreased by 10%-15% after the week of sleep loss compared with their rested states. This decrease in testosterone levels was also associated with a loss of vigor among the participants.
Researchers say about 15% of adult workers in the U.S. get five hours or less of sleep per night, and this study suggests this kind of prolonged sleep loss could have a negative consequence on testosterone and men’s well-being.
Permission has been sought from all schools in South Africa by the South African Institute for Drug-Free Sport to test school children as often as possible for illegal performance enhancing drugs.
The permission request was made after the revelation of a huge increase in schoolboy rugby players using illegal anabolic steroids.
Tests conducted by Joburg company Drug Detection International on pupils at 18 of the country’s top schools found 21 out of 130 pupils – almost one in six – tested positive for illegal steroids.
Commissioned independently by various schools, Drug Detection International sent urine samples for analysis to a forensic laboratory in the US.
They found positive results for two pupils of St Albans, Pretoria; three pupils of King Edward VII in Joburg; and found that one boy from St John’s in Joburg had twice the amount of testosterone levels for a teenager his age.
Fifteen of the other pupils who tested positive were from private schools in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal. At least 12 were caught with banned steroids in their possession.
Director of the SA Institute for Drug-Free Sport Dr Shuaib Manjra said, “We need a legislative framework or, alternatively, a consensus policy for all schools to abide by. Once we have jurisdiction, then we require resources to introduce these programmes into schools, this would include education, testing and prosecution. We also require parental consent.”
Giro d’Italia rider Dario Frigo was sacked by his Fassa Bortolo team recently after illegal drugs were found during a police raid on his hotel room in San Remo.
The team had received an official notice from the police that drugs had been found, according to Manager Giancarlo Ferretti on phone.
The Italian was lying second overall in the Giro, 15 seconds behind compatriot Gilberto Simoni after leading the race for nine days. His sacking means he will be unable to continue in the race.
Police raided team hotels on Wednesday evening in the biggest crackdown on doping in cycling since the notorious 1998 Tour de France. Italian news agency ANSA quoted police sources as saying substances including testosterone, caffeine, adrenal and anabolic steroids and other stimulants had been seized.
Organisers cancelled Thursday’s 18th stage as the cyclists held a seven-hour meeting. Italy’s Mario Cipollini won the sprint finish at the end of yesterday’s 181k stage from Alba to Busto Arsizio.
Ferretti said, “Dario admitted this and so, under the rules of the team, he was immediately sacked.”
A Compton man has agreed to plead guilty to possession and distribution of illegal steroids over the internet, according to an agreement announced by the Federal prosecutors in Los Angeles.
An international trafficking investigation in 2007 rounded up around 1,200 people, including Warren Abramson.
An international trafficking investigation in 2007 rounded up more than 120 people, including Warren Abramson. Prosecutors charged him with intending to sell about 200 gallons of anabolic steroids – a controlled substance that mimics the male hormone testosterone. Athletes often use the steroids to help them build up muscle, but the substance carries a risk of causing serious mental and physical health problems. The volume on hand amounted to more than a quarter-million doses. In a plea agreement, prosecutors also said Abramson kept four firearms, three silencers and more than 4,500 rounds of ammunition at the Compton address he used as his lab. Abramson has agreed to plead guilty on five drug and weapons-related counts.
The court hasn’t scheduled his plea hearing; he faces as many as 55 years in federal prison and one-and-a-quarter-million dollars in fines. Most of the other suspects arrested in the investigation have pleaded guilty. Law enforcement agencies from Mexico, Canada, Thailand, Sweden, China and four other countries participated in the investigation.
Abramson was charged with intent to sell approximately 200 gallons of anabolic steroids.
According to a finding disclosed by researchers at the University of Minnesota, involvement in sporting events with real or real or perceived weight specifications is commonly associated with steroid use among teens.
Marla Eisenberg, Sc.D., M.P.H., assistant professor at the University Of Minnesota Medical School, Department Of Pediatrics, said the association between unhealthy weight control approaches and weight-centered sporting events is alarming.
“It is encouraging to see that the majority of young people who reported using steroids in 1999 stopped using them as they got older,” said Patricia van den Berg, Ph.D., lead author of the study from the University of Minnesota School of Public Health. “But even given this decline, between one and three in 100 teens still reported using steroids within the last year when asked again 5 years later.”
Researchers conducted the longitudinal study with more than 2,000 adolescents to examine changes in eating patterns, weight, physical activity, and related factors over five years. Participants completed two surveys, one in 1999 and one in 2004, to determine if there were changes in steroid use.
Overall, 1.7 percent of boys and 1.4 percent of girls between the ages of 15 and 23 reported steroid use in 2004. Those that reported use early on were 4 to 10 times more likely to use later in life.
More and more teenagers are switching to use of anabolic androgenic steroids that are termed as synthetic derivatives of the male hormone, testosterone, to enhance body strength, performance, and stamina.
China should make it a criminal offence to offer banned performance-enhancing substances to athletes and jail those found guilty, according to a leading sports ministry official.
After fearing embarrassment at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the Chinese sports ministry cracked down on the use of drugs.
Most positive tests in recent years have been at provincial level or below, including the unearthing of 450 doses of EPO, testosterone and steroids during a raid on a Liaoning athletics school’s training camp in 2006.
Jiang Zhixue, director of the science and education department at the sports ministry, said there was insufficient deterrent for coaches and officials who administer drugs to athletes.
“We are confined to punishing them technically, giving them bans or fines but nothing more,” Jiang was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency.
“The (current) regulations have certain connection with the criminal law but the criminal law doesn’t have specific terms regarding this area.”
However, if it was made a criminal offence one of the punishments could be imprisonment.
Jiang said the Chinese Anti-Doping Agency had conducted 14,042 tests in 2009 — 13,336 urine tests and 706 blood tests, more than 6,000 of which were random — and 25 gave positive results.
It is worth noting here that athletes from China were at the center of a string of doping scandals in the 1990s and early years of this century.
A leading medical authority has criticized usage of anti-aging hormones in response to a recently released report “The use of hormones for “anti-aging”: a review of efficacy and safety,” by the American Medical Association’s (AMA) Council.
The example demonstrated by the AMA was applauded by Dr. Thomas T. Perls, an associate professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine. AMA recently made an assessment of benefits and risks associated with growth hormone, testosterone, estrogen, and DHEA for anti-aging.
“The AMA’s review of the risks and benefits of these hormones in the setting of anti-aging and athletic enhancement is very important given its inclusion of the consensus and position statements of the key professional medical societies as well as the federal agencies that guard public health.” states Dr. Perls in the editorial.
The editorial summarizes the AMA’s assessment for each of the purported anti-aging hormones and essentially the bottom line of his argument is that in terms of anti-aging, the risks of these hormones out-weigh the little or no benefit. Dr. Perls denounces the marketing of these hormones, particularly growth hormone and anabolic steroids (anabolic steroids are variations of testosterone), for anti-aging. He also provides guidelines for spotting “red flags of quackery” and basic advice that physicians can lend to their patients in their pursuit of healthy aging.
The efforts of AMA were appreciated by Dr. Perls in an editorial appearing in the Future Medicine journal Aging Health.
Concentrations of sex hormones, estrogen in women and testosteronein men, may have a positive effect on the regenerative potential of cartilage tissue, according to researchers from Germany.
It was suggested during a study that hormone replacement in the joint fluid of men and women can be advantageous when it comes to treating late stages of human osteoarthritis (OA) by regenerating damaged tissue.
Nicolai Miosge, M.D., Ph.D., and colleagues from the August University in Goettingen, Germany examined the regenerative potential of chondrogenic progenitor cells (CPCs) that are present in arthritic tissue during the late stages of OA. The research team speculated that these CPCs might be influenced by sex steroids, and therefore hormone replacement therapy directed to the joint fluid could be beneficial in restoring damaged tissue. Tissue samples from 372 patients who underwent total knee replacement were analyzed. The mean age was 71 years of age for men and 72 years for women, with women representing 64.25% of participants.
Estrogens are known to influence bone metabolism and researchers found that 17β-estradiol (E2), which increases calcium deposition in both sexes, was present in the joint fluid of study participants. CPCs positive for estrogen receptors (ERα and ERβ) as well as androgen receptors were present in the OA tissue as well. Both estrogen and testosterone influenced the expression of all 3 receptor genes and the CPCs by regulating gene expression.
The results of this evidence-based study appeared in an issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism, a journal published by Wiley-Blackwell on behalf of the American College of Rheumatology.
βarrestin2, a protein used for the purpose of regulation of androgen receptors’ expression, can be a new focal point for staging and curing testosterone-fueled prostate cancer, as per medical College of Georgia researchers. The study findings were reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition.
As per study’s corresponding author, Dr. Yehia Daaka, Distinguished Chair in Oncologic Pathology in the MCG School of Medicine, an increase in the number of androgen receptors was what considered to be behind the growth of prostate cancer progression in men with advanced disease.
With increased numbers of androgen receptors, prostate cancer can make use of the limited testosterone available after a diseased prostate gland is removed or after testosterone production is blocked by drug therapy. In fact, the increased number of androgen receptors may mutate so they can start feeding off other steroidsor even growth factors, Dr. Daaka says.
These wily skills help explain why cancer returns despite initially promising treatment results.
“It is clear that signaling by the androgen receptor is paramount for not only the initiation but also the progression of the disease, including escape to a hormone-refractory disease,” he says. Moves androgen receptors make to support cancer growth make it “unbeatable at this point,” for some patients.
However increased levels of βarrestin2 appear to halt the potentially deadly increase in androgen receptor expression, the MCG research team has found.
Dr. Daaka, a Georgia Cancer Coalition Distinguished Cancer Scholar, remarked that initiation and progression of prostate cancer can be regulated by regulated by expression or non-expression of activation or repression of the androgen receptors’ co-factors.
The involved collaborators included Dr. Vijayabaskar Lakshmikanthan, postdoctoral fellow; Dr. Lin Zou, former postdoctoral fellow; Jae Kim, graduate student; Dr. Nidia C. Messias, assistant professor; and Dr. Zhongzhen Nie, assistant professor; from the MCG Department of Pathology; and Drs. Allison Michal and Jeffrey L. Benovic from Thomas Jefferson University.
In what was demonstrated in court as a multi-agency effort to take down”, a large international conspiracy” to peddle anabolic steroids and other illegal muscle building drugs, the Federal prosecutors landed two guilty pleas.
A week of sleep loss could mean loss of up to 15 percent of 
Permission has been sought from all schools in South Africa by the South African Institute for Drug-Free Sport to test school children as often as possible for illegal performance enhancing drugs.
Giro d’Italia rider Dario Frigo was sacked by his Fassa Bortolo team recently after illegal drugs were found during a police raid on his hotel room in San Remo.
A Compton man has agreed to plead guilty to possession and distribution of illegal 
According to a finding disclosed by researchers at the University of Minnesota, involvement in sporting events with real or real or perceived weight specifications is commonly associated with 
China should make it a criminal offence to offer banned performance-enhancing substances to athletes and jail those found guilty, according to a leading sports ministry official.
A leading medical authority has criticized usage of anti-aging hormones in response to a recently released report “The use of hormones for “anti-aging”: a review of efficacy and safety,” by the American Medical Association’s (AMA) Council.
Concentrations of sex hormones, estrogen in women and 
βarrestin2, a protein used for the purpose of regulation of androgen receptors’ expression, can be a new focal point for staging and curing testosterone-fueled prostate cancer, as per 